August 09, 2013

Publicom And The Fatberg Of Online Self-Importance

Ten days ago two rich
advertising men - closeted by a small, sharkish cabal of investment bankers
sniffing a wedge - cut a deal. Ten days later, a fatberg of online bilge has
spewed from hundreds of thousands of online sources in over sixty countries.
Sift your way through all the opinion, comment and knowledge and two dominant
terms emerge: “I” and “my.” No-one knew. But did that stop the advertising and
comms industry telling you it knew? (Rhetorical).

Advertising and comms is an
insecure and paranoid business. There is an endless race to be the ear that the
CEO whispers an insight into, in the hunt for competitive and financial
advantage. PR fares little better – in fact, the industry is fairly overt about
it – whinging about its inferiority – rather than acting on it.

Perception and reality are
two different beasts – as one would expect from an industry whose business is
perception. On day two or three of Publicom, what began to grate was reading a
stream of links from people roughly one hundred steps removed from the
Wren/Levy meetings; giving their own seals of approvals on smartphones,
thousands of miles away.

“The more I see of this Publicis-Omnicom deal the
more I like.”

“Here’s the downside to the Publicis-Omnicom merger.”

“Publicis-Omnicom isn’t a surprise for five reasons.”

“Wren’s been smart here..”

Wren and Levy’s surnames
were dropped into posts with the ease and intimacy of football managers doing a
deal over a £10million “Macedonian misfit,” or a “wantaway striker.”